I think you can miss a lot by approaching a literary work as containing "filler." I'm another who enjoyed the whaling and cetology parts of Moby Dick, and similarly, with the help of a very astute Shakespeare professor, I realized that thinking of any scene in his plays as just "comic relief" is wrong. In either case, great authors make choices about content. The Shakespeare example in particular -- I am very confident that no "comic relief" scene fails to also add substantively to the play.

I think it's fine if people want to read an abridged version of something so they can get the gist of it. But it will be an abridged version, and not somehow a better version of itself.